The Union health ministry has asked doctors to mention the reason while prescribing antibiotics in a bid to curb the growing resistance of the drug among the citizens, The Times of India reported.

Antibiotics are drugs used to prevent and cure bacterial infections among humans, animals and plants.

Director General of Health Services Doctor Atul Goel has written a letter, appealing to doctors and pharmacists to mandatorily ensure that antibiotics as well as medicines under the Schedules H and H1 of the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules are sold under valid prescriptions.

According to the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, the medicines that fall under Schedules H and H1 cannot be sold without a prescription.

“It is in urgent appeal to all the doctors to make it a mandatory practice to write indication/reason/Justification while prescribing anti-microbials,” the letter said. “Looking forward to your support the promote judicious use of anti-microbials to reduce emergence of AMR.”

It also urged doctors and pharmacists to ensure that over-the-counter sales of Schedule H and H1 drugs are stopped. Over-the-counter sales of Schedule H and H1 drugs are a widespread cause for the rise in anti-microbial resistance among Indians.

In terms of treatment, India still does not use technology to find anti-microbial resistance of bugs in patients before starting treatment. This leads to a situation of developing further drug resistance in a bug

In 2019, anti-microbial resistance was directly responsible for 1.27 million deaths and contributed to 4.95 million deaths globally, according to the World Health Organization. The resistance has undermined the gains of medicine as it makes infections harder to treat and medical procedures such as surgery, caesarean sections and cancer chemotherapy much riskier, says the global health body.

Dr Mahua Kapoor Dasgupta, the director of Medical Affairs at Haystack Analytics, told Scroll that whole genome sequencing is a solution to diagnose resistance in a microbe to various drugs and simplify treatments by using drugs that are effective.

“When patients are introduced to treatment, the current diagnosis is limited to microbiology,” she said. “Whole genome sequencing needs to be accessible and affordable to become rampant in use.”

Currently, the average cost of whole genome sequencing starts at Rs 6,000.

Anil Navandar, the secretary of the Maharashtra State Druggists And Chemists Association, told Scroll his organisation is holding regular training and awareness workshops for chemists to avoid the use of antibiotics.

“The issue is not just that of a pharmacist,” Navandar said. “Several chemist shops have unqualified personnel who dispense medicines. How do we sensitise them?”